When comparing GameMaker: Studio vs Flixel, the Slant community recommends GameMaker: Studio for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”GameMaker: Studio is ranked 9th while Flixel is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose GameMaker: Studio is:

GameMaker: Studio is incredibly easy to learn. It requires almost no programming knowledge which means that those without the technical experience, such as designers or artists, can create their projects without the help of a programmer.

Pros

Pro

Extremely easy to learn

GameMaker: Studio is incredibly easy to learn. It requires almost no programming knowledge which means that those without the technical experience, such as designers or artists, can create their projects without the help of a programmer.

Pro

Gives developers access to a more fine-grained controle over the logic through the Game Maker Language

Game Maker Language (GML) is the primary scripting language that is interpreted similarly to Java's Just-In-Time compilation used in GameMaker. It is used to further enhance and control the design of a game through more conventional programming, as opposed to the drag and drop system.

Pro

Easy to find resources/tutorials/assistance

GameMaker: Studio has a huge following, tons of people put up tutorial videos, and it's just generally easy to find help. It has a huge community.

Pro

Assets can easily be found in the official marketplace

Yoyogames website has a marketplace which opens up an opportunity for people to sell or giveaway created assets and resources (sprites, scripts, sounds, extensions, full source codes, etc.) for use in GameMaker. This benefits people who needs quality assets for their games, and for creative people to provide these assets for extra income. The Marketplace has a rating system so it can eventually increase the quality and competitiveness of the assets submitted.

Pro

It has an IDE used for loading all of the assets

It is very easy to manage all the resources you want to put in your game, the UI widgets for each assets (sprites, sounds, backgrounds, rooms, objects and shaders) are intuitive enough for when adding or even editing the properties of each your assets. The included editors are also good and easy to use (sprite/image editors, shader editor and room editor).

Pro

Easy to use

Pro

Extremely stable

GameMaker: Studio has been around since 1999 and has been used and maintained during all this time. This makes it an extremely stable game engine.

Pro

Cross-platform multiplayer support

There is the possibility of creating games that interact with different platforms and is not that hard.

Pro

Easy cross-platform shader support

Write your own shaders in one shader language and have it automatically ported to all platforms. You can even choose a specific shader language to wield the full power of the target device.

Pro

Built-in support for pixel-perfect collisions

Enabling pixel-perfect collisions on 2D sprites is so easy many will likely turn it on when maybe they might be better off without it. Regardless, it simplifies small and/or retro console-like game work. This is a feature fairly unique in this class of game engines.

Pro

Supports 3D

There is also 3D support that doesn't interfere with the primary 2D focus.

Pro

Many ports available

Pro

Built-in pathfinding and following

Pathfinding just means figuring out how to (or if you can) get from A to B. FlxTilemap has a function FlxTilemap.findPath() which returns a FlxPath object, which is just a collection of "nodes", or FlxPoint objects.

Pro

Camera system for split screen

Create effects like "split screen" views, or "picture in picture" style displays, or even mini-maps with FlxCamera. Each camera is an independent display object, with its own zoom, color tint, rotation, and scaling values.

Pro

Record and play back replays

Replays are essentially a list of what keyboard keys were pressed, and what mouse inputs were given, during a specific time frame. Because Flixel is largely deterministic, you can use that information to recreate a gameplay session that someone else recorded, as long as you have the same SWF.

Pro

Flixel Power Tools extend the functionality

Pro

Used to create Canabalt, game that started endless runner genre

Ad

Cons

Con

Exporting to some formats costs extra

You need to buy extra modules to be able to export to platforms like Android, iOS, HTML5 and others.

Con

No built-in refactoring tools

There are no built-in refactoring tools. For example, you can rename a resource, but GM:S will not automatically change the mentions of it across the code to the new name. Furthermore, because all file formats are text-based, basic refactoring could be achieved by simply doing "find & replace in all files" -- which is a feature offered by pretty much every external code editor nowadays -- but no such feature here. Hitting Ctrl-F will pull up a rather odd Find/Replace box but selecting a word before hitting Ctrl-F will not autofill the Find field for you like it will in most tools. Even that you have to cut and paste yourself.

Con

The scripting language used is quite limited

Language does not support actual objects, structs, real data types, functions, overloading, even argument naming. Developers generally have to code around the lack of these features in very tricky ways.

Con

Development has been and will be cosmetic

The change from 1.x to 2.x was cosmetic, the engine and language stayed the same. The roadmap for future development is also cosmetic and includes updating the sprite editor, adding an audio editor, and adding a "mini map" for the IDE.

Con

Destructive DRM

In late 2012/early 2013, YoYo Games released a version of their new Studio IDE for cross-platform development that would import games and destroy all of the image type resources for some legitimate purchasers of the software by superimposing a pirate symbol on top of the image. This was due to a fault in their digital rights management software implementation which they use as a method of combating pirated copies of the software. Though the false positives bug is reported to be fixed, the DRM is still in place and may affect placeholder graphics, etc. YoYoGames publicly stated they would remove the DRM at a later point in time, but that other less-invasive DRM techniques would remain.

Con

Bad history of ignoring critical bugs

In the past, the developer failed to update the software for iOS and Android when game-breaking updates were made to those platforms.

Con

Expensive for what it offers

There are several options with more flexibility, better learning resources, and a lower price point.

Con

Can't embed videos in game

Doesn't support embedding videos in a game.

Con

Poor level editor

No marquee select, no layers, can be glitchy, no grouping, etc.

Con

The cost to buy for development is outrageous

The cost for this tool is hindering for indie developers who have little money to work with.

Con

Tends to crash or not compile games properly

Con

No GUI editor

The GUI must be hard-coded, leaving a lot of tricky calculations and jumping through hoops to accommodate different devices and displays; it's probably the least developed and hardest thing about GMS2 compared to comparable engines

Con

Proprietary language forces expensive "lock in"

Because it uses GML, a very non-standard custom language, new users do not learn a transferrable language and become locked in.

Con

Poor accessibility and integration

Documentation and resources largely focus on proprietary scripting language, which is necessary for achieving full potential of the software due to poor drag and drop integration.

Con

Code editor not friendly to indented code

While the editor of course has features for intending code such as auto indent and smart tabs that can be turned on or off, these features work in unusual ways and, overall, the editor is not very adaptable to various typing styles. Also, Home always takes you to position 0 and never to the beginning of the text no matter how many times you hit it. Thus, if you hit Home and then Enter a new line, with auto indent on, it will always mess up the indentation on the line following the new line leaving you to fudge around to fix it manually. If you prefer tabs over spaces, forget it. Finally, if you leave the GameMaker app and try to click back into the code editor, the code editor will not fully get the focus sometimes leaving you with the ability to type but not tab. It usually takes two clicks to fully focus the code editor from outside the GM app.

Con

No way to activate or use existing modules

Support entirely focused on new iteration depriving even basic functionality of this version with any purchase that hasn't already been activated. It is still possible, thought not intuitive, to download this version on the trail screen for GM S 2. But no purchased (wildly expensive) module can be added any longer.

Con

This is very flat for games

They are not beautiful - for example, Undertale.

Con

Owned by a gambling company, Playtech

As opposed to other engines, which are open source or owned by game companies, GameMaker is developed by YoYoGames, which is owned by Playtech, a gambling software company.

Con

Development has stopped

Seems like development for Flixel has stopped. The last commit on all of the branches of it's Github repository are from 2011.

Con

Poor performance on mobile

Alternative Products

Each month, over 2.8 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.